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88

Cheat Code Central

Ultimate Band is not a looker. It's colorful and cartoonish but it lacks personality. The characters look like Lego-people and the backgrounds are either generic or tacky. The instruments are well designed; they are big and take up both screens. The menus are easy to access as is the control scheme that will accommodate both left and right handed gamers. There are 15 tunes, but not performed by the original artists. The cover band does do a good job. Unlike the Wii, there are no vocals in this version. But you can connect to the Wii and use the DS to control the lighting production. It's not a big deal, but at least it's a deal.

Ultimate Band may not make you a star, but at least it will make you feel like one.

Overall, Ultimate Band for the NDS is a very good entry in the genre. Realistic instruments and an easy-to-use set of creation tools are innovations that should become common across all rhythm games. While only players who are able to overcome the painfully shortened and poorly vocalized set list will truly enjoy the title, all fans of the genre will find something to like.

If it sounds complex, just understand this: It makes it surprisingly easy for you to make decent sounding tunes, and it’ll store up to 12 of them. You can even join up over Wi-Fi and record yourself and three other players jamming together, or connect to the vastly inferior Wii version of the game and use your DS to run a light show. Guitar Hero, are you paying attention?

Ultimate Band DS won't suit anyone looking for a hardcore music experience, even on the DS. Guitar Hero On Tour is a better choice for the experienced, but younger players will appreciate the community aspect in Ultimate Band.

Ultimate Band isn't as good a game as Guitar Hero: On Tour, but it does offer more variety. Its biggest downfall is the minimal track list. The gameplay is solid, and the music studio is a great little tool that could be built upon to make something stellar. It's not going to meet the needs of the music game junkie, but it's a decent game for first time rock stars.

It's telling that my main criticism of Band is its meager song count, as it's a feat for any game that actually made me love jamming to Fall Out Boy. But after the eighth time through, I felt like lighting my DS on fire, Hendrix-style. Attempting to spice things up by adding bandmates doesn't help, either; multiplayer mode's simply a high-score duel between players. It would've been great if everyone could jam on different instruments, but filling out the "band" causes the songs on each DS to fall out of sync, divorcing you from the feeling of playing the song together. So in the end, Band's not quite a legend, but it's far from an amateur act.